Lochac Revisited

by Paul Wheatley

(London)

Marco PoLo's great work was not, as is sometimes supposed, exclusively an account of his travels but rather, as the title Le Devisement dou Monde straightforwardly implies, a description of the territories of the known world 1• Although the separate descriptions of individual places and realms are strung along the thread of the celebrated journey to China and amplified by travels in the interior of that country, the book as a whole constitutes a systematic treatise of topographical description rather than an itinerary, and includes accounts of numerous cities, kingdoms, and events of which Marco had no personal experience. This means that the Devisement is an unreliable guide to the Polan journeys, a state of affairs which in turn exa­cerbates the already severe difficulties involved in the identification of the place-names mentioned in this unique account of medieval Asia. In his efforts to locate these toponyms the Polan scholar, deprived of the guidance and support afforded by the ordered sequence of a detailed and coherent itinerary, has to rely on phonetic correspondences and such incidental -and sometimes unrepresentative - evidence as the text provides.

One place-name which has occasioned a good deal of speculation occurs in the Devisement, in its most reliable reading, as Lochac, and is applied to a grant e riches [sie] "province" somewhere in western South-East Asia. The relevant passage as it appears in the fullest and, generally speaking, the most reliable of all extant manuscripts is as follows:

1 The true character of this work is somewhat obscured by the traditional titles foisted upon it in Italy (where it is usually known as 11 Milione) andin Britain (where it has customarily been referred to as The Travels of Marco Polo). The difficulties inherent in the attempt to restore the original title of the work are discussed by A. C. MauLE in MoULE and Paul PELLIOT, Marco Polo: the description of the world (George Routledge & Sons, Ltd., London, 1938), pp. 31-33 and by PELLlOT in Notes on Marco Polo. Ouvrage posthume publiE~ sous les auspices de l'Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres et avec le concours du Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique, vol. 2 (Imprimerie Nationale: Librairie Adrien-Maisonneuve, Paris, 1963), pp. 625-626. Devisement is the form favoured by PELLlOT (op. cit. , p . 625}, but in a subtitle prefixed to that part of his critical edition cantairring the actual text the Italian scholar BENEDETTO uses the version Devisament [Marco Polo, 11 Milione, prima edi~ione integrale, a cura di Luigi Foscolo BENEDETTO. Comitato Geog.rafico Naz~ona~e Itahano, Pubbl. no. 3 (Firenze, 1928)). Additional versions of the htle occurnng m surrdry other recensions are listed by PELLIOT, loc. cit.

85

CI DEVISE DE L'ISLE DE SONDUR ET DE CELLE DE CONDUR. Et quant I' en se part de ceste ysJe de iaua et il naje entre midi et garbin DCC milles, adonc treuve 1' en deus ysles, une grant et une mendre que s'apellent [Je une] Sandur et l'autre Condur. E de cestes ysJes se part 1' en, et aJa por sceloc entor de D milJes; et adonc treuvo I' en une provence que est apeJJe Locac que mautest grant e riches. 11 hi a un grant roi et sunt ydres et ont Jangajes por elz. 1J ne font treu a nelui, por ce que il sunt en tel Jeu que nuJ puet aler sor Jor tere por maufer. Car, se il i se peust aJer, Je grant kan Je soumeteroit tost sot sa segnorie. En ceste provence naist Je be[r]t;:i domesce en grandisime quantite. 11 ont or en grant abondance, si grant que nulz Je peust croir qui ne Je veist. 11 ont Jeofant e chacejonz e venajonz asez. Et de ceste reigne vont toutes Jes porceJaine que s' espenent en toutes provences, com jeo vos ai contes. Autre couse ne i a que a mentovoir face , for que je vos di qu'il est si sauvajes Jeu que pou jens hi vont. Et Je roi mesme ne velt que aucun hi aille, ne Jque] nuJ saiche son tresor ne sa condision. Or adonc nos partiron de ci et vos conteron avant d'autre couse.

CI DEVISE DE L'ISLE DE PENT AIN.

Or sachies que quant l'en se part de Locac, et il aJa D milles por midi, adonc treuve I' en une isJe que est apeJJe Pentan, que maut est sauvajes

leu 2•

A. C. MouLE's translation of this passage, with additions from a selected nurober of other good representative recensions incorporated in italics. is as follows 3 :

HERE HE TELLS OF THE ISLAND OF SONDUR AND OF THOSE OF CO ND UR.

And when one departs from this greata island of Java and he sails be­tween midday and the south-west wind 700 miles, then one finds thesea two islands, one large and one smaller, which are called the onea Sondur and the other Condur, which isJands are uninhabited, and so Jet it be passed over about themb. And thena from these twoa islands one sets out because there is nothing which does to mentiona, and goes again still sailing about a 500 miles by the sirocco, and then one finds a pro­vince which is on the firm land b, which is called Lochac, which is very

2 From BENEDETTo's transcription of a text written in the firsthalf of the fourteenth century and now MS. fran<;ais 1116 in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris [Marco PoLo, 1J Milione, pp. 169-170]. This text, now known as the F version, is the Iongest of all extant manuscripts and retains a good deal of the Gallicized Italian language in which the narrative was probably first recorded. It has also commonly been styled the Geographie Text since it was printed literatim by the Socü~te de Geographie of Paris as volume 1 of Recueil de Voyages et de Memoires {Paris, 1824). The most com­pendious statement of the filiation of the more than 150 extant recensions of PoLo's textisthat of BENEDETTO [Joc. eil. , pp. xi-ccxxi], but there are many valuable collations in the Introduction and tables which accompany MoULE's variorum edition of the text in English translation: Marco Polo. The description of the world, vol. 1.

3 MouLE and PELLIOT, Marco Polo. The description of the world, vol. 1, PP· 369-370.

86

great and ridl. Andin that provincea there is a great king, and the people of itb they are idolaters and have a language for themselves . Andb they pay tribute to none but to their own kingc, because it is very strongc and they are in sudl a strange and out of the waya place that none in the world in any waya can go upon their land to do thema anyb harm. For if he could go there in any way whatevera the qreat Kaan would very gladly and verya soon put them under his rule. For he has very often put hirnself to trouble and all the others with him to know how he could over­come them; but he could never do anything. And you may know thata. in this province the cultivated brazil grows in very great quantities, which are like lemons and are very goodd to eate, and also much musk and ebonyf. They have gold in verya great abundance, anda so great profusiona that none could believe it who did not see it. They have ele­phants, and chase and hunting enough. And from this kingdom go all the cowries which are spent in all the otherb provinces of the worJda as I have told you before a. There is no other thing that is worthy of mention, except onJyb that I teil you that it is so strong and out ot the way andg mountainous andb wild a place that few people go there, and they can go there with difficultyg. And the kinghirnself does not wish that any may go there nor thata any may know his treasure nor his condition. Now then we will depart from telling you ota. this and will teil you on­wards of another thing.

HEREHE TELLS OF THE ISLAND OF PENTAN.

Now you may know againa that when one sets out from the province o/3

Lochac and he goes sailinga five hundred miles by midday then one finds an island full of mountains h which is called Pentan which is in b a very wild place ...

(a) MS. 264 in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (PB). This is a translation into Court French made in about A. D. 1400.

(b) The Zelada Codex (Z), a Latin translation of c. 1470 of a Romance text which is clearly superior to any of the others which have survived. It is now in the Biblioteca Catedral (MS. 49,20) at Toledo and is fully described by Moule in vol. 1 of the work cited in foot­note 1.

(c) MS. Reg. 14. C. xiii in the British Museum (P). This is a fourteenth­century version of Fra Francesco Pipino's popular Latin trans­lation, itself based on a Venetian recension.

(d) Bibi. Casanatense, MS. 3999, a Venetian rendering of the F version made early in the fourteenth century (VA).

(e) An Italian version printed in vol. 2 of Giovanni-Battista Ramusio's Nauigationi et Viaggi of 1559 (R). Benedetto has shown that this text, of which there is no MS version, is based on the P recension.

(f) MS. Dond delle Rose, 224, Museo Correr, Venice (VB), another Venetian rendering, dated 1446.

87

(g) 336 NB 5, Bibi. Pub., Perrara (L), a Latin compendium compiled early in the fifteenth century.

(h) C. 32. m. 4 in the British Museum (S). This is a Spanish version printed at Seville in 1503, of a Venetian recension of 1493 (Vu/

The precise significance to be attadled to this passage will depend to a large extent on the view taken of the structure of Polo's text at this stage of his narrative. From Zaitün ( = Ch'üan-chou [tJ 4) southwards as far as Ciamba ( = Campä 5) it is evident that the topographical description is following the supposed sequence of Polo's horneward voyage, but from that point onwards such a contention is difficult to sustain. Immediately follow­ing the account of Ciamba is the statement that,

• Or sachies que quant 1' en se part de Cianba, et ala entre midi et sceloc MD milles, et adonc vient a une grandisime isle, que est apelle Jaua ... 6

... when one leaves Campä he goes sailingb between midday and the sirocco 1500 miles, and then he comes to a very !arge island which is called Java ...

4 c;:aiton et al. in F, c;:aytun, zaytun, et al. in Z. The identification witb Cb'üan-Cbou was first proposed by tbe Jesuitscholar Martino MARTINI in bis Novus Atlas Sinensis (sub "Civencheu "}, printed at Arnsterdarn in 1656. It was subsequently given other than circurnstantial substance by J. H. KLAPROTH, wbo recognized in Zaitün a tran­scription of • ts'ie-d'ung 121 (MSC = tz'ii-t'ung), a term by wbicb tbe citywas popu­larly known after trees of tbat name (probably bere to be understood as Acanthro­panax ricinifolium, though sorne bave thought Erythrina lndica) bad been planted round its walls in about the mindle of the Five Dynasties: vide "Renseignemens [sie! sur les ports de Gampou et de Zaithoum decrits par Marco PoLo", Journal Asiatique, vol 5 (1824), pp. 41-44; also "Description de la Cbine SOUS le regne de la dynastie mongole, traduite du persan et accompagnee de notes", Journal Asiatique, vol. 11 (1833), p. 342. This conclusion has been contested on several occasions, both on general bistorical grounds (including alleged limitations of tbe barbaurage facil it ies at Ch'üan-Chou) and because of the obvious imperfection of tbe transcription, • ts'ift­d'ung implying a • situn (possibly • sidun if tbe transcription were pre-tenth century) rather tban zaitiin . However, after an exbaustive review of tbe wbole problern Paul PELLJOT could only conclude that, despite tbe apparent inexactness of the transcription , the arguments were overwbelmingly in favour of Cb'üan-Cbou [Notes on Marco Polo, vol. 1, pp. 583-5971.

5 cinba (erroneously) in F, camba in Z, ziamba/ziambi in R. The Cbam port-of-call for ships making tbe southward passagein PoLo's time was on tbe site of present-day Quinbon, then known to the Chinese as Hsin Chou 131. Tbe precise date of PoLo's presumed visit on bis borneward voyaqe is uncertain. Aldo R.Icci [Travels of Marco Polo , with introduction and index by SirE. Denison Ross (George Routledge & Sons, Ltd ., London, 1931)] and BENEDETTO {ll Libro di Messer Marco Polo, cittadino di Venezia detto Milione dove si raccontano Le Meraviglie del Mondo (Milane and Roma, 1932)] adopted tbe year 1285, Sir Henry YULE favoured 1288 [The Book of Ser Marco Polo the Venetian concerning the kingdoms and marvels of the East, 2 vols. (First edition, John Murray, London 1871). Citations in this paper are to the third edition, revised by Henri CoRDIER in 1903, and to a tbird volume compiled by CoRDIER in 1920 : Notesandaddenda to Sir Henry Yule's edition of Ser Marco Polo], and more recently PELLJOT has argued for a stilllater date, possibly 1290 [op. cit., vol. 1, p. 225] , that is early in the reign of Jaya Siilhavarman III (1288--1307).

6 BE EDETTO, 11 Milione, p . 169.

1. ~~+I 2 . WIJ{fO]

88

After a eulogistic description ofthat island there follows the passage relating to Sondur, Condur, and Lochac which is quoted above, including the mention of Pentan some D milles (500 miles) to the southward. Clearly this series of passages can be held to constitute consecutively arranged stages in a voyage through the waters of Sauth-East Asia only by postulating either egregious and repeated errors in direction, distance, sequence, and topo­nymic transcription of a magnitude and consistency found nowhere eise in Polo's narrative, or - as some early Western cartographers did _ the existence of land in the ocean to the south of Java 7 • Neither of these alter­natives is acceptable, so that today there is no realistic alternative to the view that this section of the text is a schedule of topographical descriptions of places whidl Marco Polo had either visited or heard about, mainly, but not exclusively, during bis horneward voyages.

Ciamba is identified beyond all reasonable doubt, and the same might have been said of jaua 9 had not Professor BENEDETTO lent his authority to a loca­tion in Kalimantan (still known to the Western world as Borneo when he was writing) 10• However, this scholar was unduly influenced by a pre­posterous theory of CHARIGNON who supposed that Qubilai's campaign of 1292/3 was directed against a Chao-wa [41 ( = Java) in south-eastern Indo-

7 Cf., int. al., Linsdwten's printed world map of Petrus Plancius of 1592 with its rubric Lucach regnum attached to a landmass far to the south of Java Maior. Linschoten's printed map of eastern Asia (1596) preserved both the general concept of a Terra Australis and its presumed Polan toponymy, though on this occasion the cartographer had adopted a corrupt reading which stemmed ultimately from the Basle edition of 1532, namely Beach < Boeach < Locach. On a map of "Meridional India" included in Emanuel Godinho DE EREDIA's Declara{:am de Malaca e Jndia Meridional com o Cathay (Goa, 1613), between folios 51 and 53, the cartographer incorporated three versions of this name: Lucac, Lucaveac, and Beach. In this he was probably influenced by one of the maps of either the Mercators or Ortelius, where Lucach and Beach also occur in combination.

8 It must be admitted, though, that this is not the view of Dr Colin JACK-HINTO , the latest author to attempt a reconstruction of PoLo's Sauth-East Asian toponymy, who has undertaken what in my opinion is the impossible task of trying to combine Marco's topographical descriptions into a coherent itinerary: "Marco Polo in Sauth­East Asia. A preliminary essay in reconstruction", Journal [of] Southeast Asian History, vol. 5, no. 2 (1964), pp. 43-103. His view of the text as a consecutive sequence of voyages is explicit, when he writes in Note 4 on p. 49 of this paper, "To accept the direction as south-east is to identify Lochac with some kingdem in Borneo, and ... it is unlikely that Polo would have wandered from what we know to have been the main maritime trade raute between the Straits of Malacca and the China Sea. To accept the reading south-east as correct is to involve a whole sequence of later corrections in order to reconcile Polo's raute with the topography of the area". And again on p. 82: " ... if Lochac is sought in Borneo, then at least one succeeding direction and relative distance would have tobe subjected to 'a deliberate distortion' in order to make any continued sense out of the itinerary".

9 This is the reading of F and of several derivative recensions. Z has caua; R and VL [Biblioteca Governativa, Lucca, MS. 296, a Venetian text of 1465] read giaua. Other orthographies include yaua, yana, zaua, jana, iauua, and the obvious mislection jajia, but I have not been able to find the Ciaua which Colin JACK-HINTON attributes to Z ["Marco Polo in South-East Asia", p. 80].

10 BE EDETTO, 11 Libro di Messer Marco Polo, p. 443.

4. Jl\E

89

china u. PELLlOT 12 has cogently refuted Benedetto's arguments, which hinge specifically on the relationship of Java to Java Ja menor (= Sumatra) ts and whidl in any case appear to incorporate a misreading of the text 14; and JACK-HINTON's subsequent suggestion that Polo's notion of Java may have been influenced by confusion with the Bornean toponym "Sabah" is not supported by an appropriate orthography in any extant recension 1s. There is, in fact, no reason to doubt that by J'Java" Polo meant precisely what con­temporary Chinese, Javanese, Malay, Arab, and Persian writers meant by the same ward, namely the island ofthat name, and this conclusion is rein­forced by the essential congruence of bis description of the island with those in the Iiteratures mentioned. The alleged distance of 1500 Venetian miles from Campii to Java is not wildly unrealistic given the manner in which nautical distances were calculated in the thirteenth century, and a direction of south-south-east not unduly inaccurate if Polo was attempting to indicate the relative positions of Quinhon and the heartland of the empire of Singha­säri in the Brantas valley of eastern Java. In any case there is no reason to suppose that he visited any part of Java, and mostmodern commentators since Sir Henry YULE 16 have concluded that this section of his book was a digression, a point of view with which I am in entire agreement 17• Such di­gressions are extremely common in the work but, because they are masked by a uniformity of style, can often be distinguished only inferentially. Per­haps the most ambitious series of ·such passages is that in which Marco de­scribed the countries of the East African littoral, Arabia, Abyssinia , and Socotra, in none of whidl bad he ever set foot. Nor, despite the lengthy de­scriptions included in his narrative, did he visit Baghdäd or Mosul, or for that matter the Burmese capital of Pagan, whose gold- and silver-plated temple spires he described with evident enthusiasm. Nor, indeed, is it always

11 A. J . H. CHARIGNON, Le Livre de Marco Polo, vol. 3 (Albert Nachbauer, Pekin, 1926) , pp. 150- 157.

12 PELLIOT, Notes on Marco Polo, vol. 2, pp. 755-756. 13 One of BE EDETTo's reasons [11 Libro, p . 443, sub Giava, Ja Grande] for rejecting

the equivalence jaua = Java was that the island of that name is not situated to tbe north-east of Java Ja menor ( = Sumatra). The tex t nowhere provides an explicit sta tement of this relationship so that it is to be presumed that BENEDETTO arrived at this conclusion as a result of bis emendations of the Polan directions and distances ; but I have been unable to discover precisely how he manipulated them. BE EDETTo's concern that Sumatra (Java Ja menor) was in fact areally more extensive than Java can be discounted, as tbe notion that the island reached far to the southward was common to both Arabs and Chinese as a result of their failure to circumnavigate it (cp. also Footnote 7).

14 BENEDETTO fibid.] pointed out that Java was not located to the south-east Ia scirocco] of Campä (but neither is Kalimantan): the text actually reads entre midi et sceloc, that is "between south and south-east" (but cf. Z: inter Ieuantem & syrocum).

15 JAcK-HINTON, op. cit., p. 80. William MARSDEN had made much the same sugges­tion in 1818, though without adducing the presumed orthographical influence of Sabah: vide The travels of Marco Polo (London, 1818) . Re-edited by Thomas Wriqht (Everyman's Library: J . M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., London, 1908 and E. P. Dutton & Co., New York, 1907}, pp. xv and 334, note 1.

18 YULE, The Book of Ser Marco Polo, vol. 2, p. 274. 17 RICCI and Ross alone among recent authors include Java in Marco's horneward

itinerary [The travels of Marco Polo, p. viiiJ, although YuLE thought that the traveller might have visited Java on a former occasion: ibid.

90

certain which towns in China Polo visited or if he actually saw with his own eyes Qara-qorum, the first capital of the Mongoi empire. Similarly the topo­graphical descriptions associated with his horneward voyage can be com­bined into a coherent itinerary only if the description of Java is regarded as an excursus dealing with an important country which he heard about but did not visit.

It follows from this interpretation that Polo resumed bis narrative from Campä, and that iaua in the first sentence of the above paragraph should be emended to read ciamba. It is to be presumed that the text was originally corrupted by early copyists, possibly by Rustichello himself, who were attempting to disentangle from a series of topographical descriptions what they believed to have been the thread of an originally continuous itinerary. From this point of view the ensuing voyage of seven hundred miles in a south-south-westerly direction is wholly consonant with the communis opinio which, despite an anomaly in the distance involved, equates Sondur et Condur with the Kundur Islands 18. However, at this juncture a second

t8 sondur in F, L, VL, Z, and R; sandur in FA (MS. 5631 of the Bibliotheque Natio­nale in Paris: a French text of the fourteenth century) and FB; sendor in VA; sandii in VB; cenduz in P; sondus in LT [MS. lat. 3195 in the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris: a Latin text of the fourteenth century]. condur in F, FA, FB, L, VA, VL, Z, R, and TA 1 [the celebrated Crusca Text, MS. JI. iv. 88 in the Bibi. Nazianale at Florence, dated to about 1305]; condior in VB; condus in LT; conduz in P. Other aberrant readings include aira, chodur, and chondur. Although the identification with the Kundur Islands is beyend question, the rationale of Polo's nomenclature is still in doubt. Clearly condur = [Pulau] Kundur (Malay = Gourd !Island]: cp . Khmer Koh Tra!O.ch (with the same meaning) and Con-non, the Vi~t vocalization of the characters pronounced in Modern Standard Chinese as K'un-lun, the transcription applied in the Wu-pei-chih [5] charts ( affered to the Throne in 1628 but deriving ultimately from early in the fifteenth century) precisely to Pulau Kundur [chüan 240, folio 13 verso]. WA c Ta-yüan, in his Tao-i Chih-lüeh 161 of 1349, also uses the transcription K'un-Jun but adds, under the influence of Chinese mythology, the alternative form Chün-t'un liJ, a corruption of Hun-t'un 181 < Hun­tun 191 with the prirnary meaning of "chaos", but also the narne of a legendary animal alleged to have inhabited the slopes of the K'un-lun rnountains in Central Asia. So mudl for Condur. But what of Sondur? YuLE [The Book of Ser Marco Polo, vol. 2, p. 277] is surely correct in relating this name to the $undur-fülät ( = $undur-Pulau) of early Arab authors [e. g. 'Akhbar a~-$In wa'J-Hind, Ibn al-Faqih, Al-Idr1si, Ibn Sa'id, Al-Dimashqi, all easily accessible in Gabriel FERRA 'D, Relations de voyages et textes geographiques arabes, persans et turks relatifs a ]'Extreme-Orient du Vllle au XVIlle siecle, 2 vols. (Ernest Leroux, Paris, 1913-1914) : PELLlOT (Notes, vol. 1, p. 406) has cited other instances of Malay and Indonesian toponyms in which, despite the normal syntactical construction, pulau ( = island) has been transferred to the end of a compound]. But all Arabic writers place $undur-Jülät AFTER Campä on the sea raute from the Middle East to China, that is to the northward of Quinhon, so that it cannot have been one of the islands making up the Kundur ardlipelago. PELLlOT (loc. eil.) eventually concluded that it was Culao Charn, a small island to the south-east of Da Nang. However, PoLo sailed in a generally southerly direction from Quinhon to Sondur, so that he associated the name with the Kundur group.

s. m:1rm~

9. $1~ 7. ·~

91

digression is introduced, this time in the form of an account of the kingdom of Lochac 19 , whidllay fi.ve hundred miles por sceloc [ = sirocco], that is in a south-easterly direction. The grounds for postulating a digression here are perhaps less conclusive than in the case of Java but, in my opinion, provide the most realistic interpretation of an ambivalent section of the text. This was also the view expressed by Professor Paul Pelliot in what is still the most thorough discussion of the Lochac problern undertaken so far 20•

The reconstruction of the original toponym which Polo (or rather Rusti­chello) transcribed as Lochac, as well as its location, have already occasion­ed considerable discussion. As early as 1886 George PHILLIPS had equated it with the • La-jiw11t 1121 (MSC = Lo-yüeh) = [Se]luyut at the southern ex­tremity of the Malay Peninsula 21 , and this idea had not been entirely aban­doned by N. M. PENZER in 1929, though he erroneously identified • La-jiwf1t with the whole of the Peninsula 22 . In 1897 ToMAsCHEK had suggested that Polo's transcription Lochac had concealed a nasalized vowel and represented a form nearer to Löchac < • Lonsak, which in turn he regarded as a contrac­tion of Langkasuka, the name of a kingdom with a long history situated in the neighbourhood of Pattani on the Malay Peninsula 23

• There are several

PELLlOT cites certain ancient Vi~t and Chinese texts which tend to imply that the Chinese first applied their legendary name K'un-Jun to Culao Cham but subsequently transferred it southwards to Pulau Kundur. It is certainly true that the Chinese re fe rred to Kurrdur as "Kundurung (Chün-tu -lung [1°1: cp. Arabic Kundurunj) as late as the eighth centuryl but not in later times. Possibly the name Sundur also migrated sou thwards and bad by PoLo's time also become associated with the Kurrdur archi­pelago . PELLJOT (loc. eil.) suggested that it might have been a vague memory of Sundur as an old name for Culao Cham which caused PoLo to describe it as tbe iarger of the two islands. On the otber band the cantrast in present-day nomen­clature between Grand Condore and Petite Condore (K'un-lun Shan and Hsiao K'un­lun 1111 on the Wu-pei-chih chart) I both in the Kurrdur archipelago 1 should not be forgotten . None of this is entirely satisfactory bu t it does nothing to vitiate the patent fact that by Condur PoLo intended to refer to the Kurrdur archipelago.

19 lochac is the reading of tbe F, Z, L, and R recensionsl Jochach of P and V, and locheac of LT. locac occurs in F and TA 1 1 and lothac as a mislection in Z. Other corrupt orthographies in less reputable texts include alcay, chacho, Iocach, jocach, jocath, Jeochar, Jeocharde, loear, soncat, tac, and thac. Needless to sayl these latter aberrations may be disregarded in the following discussion.

20 Notes on Marco Polo, vol. 21 pp. 766-770. 21 George PHILLIPS 1 "The seaports of India and Ceylon" I Journal of the China

Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. 21 (1886), p. 341 note. The identification of • Ld-jiwet with Seluyut was first proposed by J. L. MoENS 1 "Srivijaya, Yava en Kataha" I Tijdschrift voor Indische Taal- , Land-en Volkenkunde, vol. 771 pt. 3 {1937), p. 337.

22 N . M. PENZER (ed.), The most noble and famous travels of Marco Polo tagether with the travels of Nico/0 de' Conti . Edited from the Elizabethan translation of John Frampton (The Argonaut Press, Londonl 1929) 1 p. lvii.

23 W. ToMASCHEK in M. BITTNER1 Die topographischen Capitel des Indischen See­spiegels MoJ:!.it (Wien, 1897) . Subsequently Gabriel FERRAND added the weight of bis au thority to this identification ["Malaka 1 Le Malayu et Maläyur" I Journal Asiatique, 11th. seriesl vol. 12 (1918) 1 pp. 139-140]. The most recent evalua tion of the evidence rela ting to Langkasuka is by WHEATLEY 1 "Langkasuka", T'oung Pao, vol. 44 (1956)~ pp . 387-412.

92

arguments that could be adduced in refutation of this identification, but the most fundamental is the fallacy that a Polan -eh- has the value of a -8-. Nor, we may add, would • Lonsak be a likely - or even a possible _ contraction of Langkasuka. RouFFAER introduced an even less tenable variation into the argument when he derived Lochac from Lailkii < Langkasuka, which he took to be a name for the whole of the southern or Malay half of the Peninsula 24.

Another interpretation which has gained some currency was first put tor­ward by GERINI, who identified Lochac with the ethnikon • La-ts'at [tSJ (MSC == Lo-ch'a)25

• Subsequently this idea was elaborated by CHARIGNON 26, and finally adopted by Benedetto who argued for a specific location in the vicin-. 27 H *LA t I • Ity of Trengganu . owever, a- s at was the normal Chmese transcrip-tion of Sanskrit riik$asa = "demon", and was applied in the seventh century A. D. to the primitive peoples of eastern Indonesia 28, possibly under the influence of a misconstrued Buddhist legend that originally related to Päta­liputra 29

•

There have been other attempts to resolve the problern of Lochac but only one need concem us here. This was the suggestion by Sir Henry Yule that

24 G. P. RoUFFAER, "Was Malaka emporium v66r 1400 A. D. genaamd Malajoer? En waar lag Woerawari, Mä-hasin, Langka, Batoesawar"? Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde van Nederlandsch-Indie, vol. 77 (1921), p. 143.

25 G. E. GERINI, Researches on Ptolemy's geography of Bastern Asia (Further India and Indo-Malay Archipelago) (The Royal Asiatic Society and the Royal Geo­graphical Society, London, 1909), pp. 496-497.

26 CHARIGNON, Le livre de Marco Polo, vol. 3, pp. 160-162. 27 BENEDETTO, Illibro di Messer Marco Polo, p. 444. 28 Vide 0. W. WoLTERS, Early Indonesian commerce (Cornell University Press,

Itbaca, New-York, 1967), pp. 198-200. Tbe term räk~asa was applied to those folk societies of eastem Indonesia unaffected by the diffusion of Indian culture by the Chinese envoy CH'ANG Chün P4l who travelled in Sauth-East Asia between A. D. 607 and 610. His report is incorporated in the Sui-shu, chüan 82, ff. 3 recto- 5 verso; in the Pei shih, chüan 95, ff. 11 verso - 14 recto; the T'ai-p'ing yü-Ian, chüan 787, ff. 1 verso- 3 recto; andin the Wen-hsien t'ung-k'ao, chüan 331, ff. 2602-3. There is also a mutilated reference to the •Lo-ts'at, which evidently derives from tbe same source, in the T'ang hui-yao, chüan 99, 1769. Sundry other brief mentions of this narne in Chinese histories and topographies relating to ancient times all stem from CH'ANG Chün's report, but in the seventeenth century the name was revived as a term of opprobrium for the Russians of Albazin: cf. PELLIOT, review of CoRDIER's "Histoire des relations de la Chine avec les puissances occidentales" in Bulletin de l'Ecole Fran<;aise d'Extreme-Orient, vol. 3 (1903), p. 686, and Lo-shu Fu, A documen­tary chronicle of Sino-Western relations (1644-1820). Monograph No. XXII of the Association for Asian Studies (University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 1966), passim.

29 Whereas in the Tsa p'i-yü ching 1151, which was translated into Chinese in about A. D. 180, *ld-ts'at demans are mentioned in connexion with tbe kingdem of • Pud­lji-piwot 1161 (Mand. = Po-Ji-fu = ?Pätaliputra) [Tripitaka of Meiji, Tökyö ed., Sho, VII, f. 32 recto], in the Chinese texts mentioned in Note 28 the • Ld-ts'at people are invariably associated with the country of • Pud-lji 1171 ( = Bali). This point is made somewhat hesitantly by PELLIOT, Notes on Marco Polo, vol. 2, p. 767.

13. *~*rJ

17. ~flj

93

the Polan orthography was Rustichello's transcription of Marco's vocaliza­tion of an aphetic contraction of [Hsien-]lo (ts) combined with a South Chinese version of the word for "kingdom ", probably in its Cantonese form of kwok [t9Jao. Lo itself was an abbreviation of Lo-hu 1201 (Ancient Chinese • Ld-yuk), the form into which Chinese authors customarily transcribed the name of the Mön-Khmer state of Lvo, situated in what is today Central Thailand. After this state had been overrun by the Hsien 1211 ( = Thai) from the northward in 1349 its subordinate statuswas indicated in Chinese annals by the prefixing of the ethnikon Hsien. Hence the form Hsien Lo-hu, which was soon abbreviated by apocope of the last syllable to Hsien-lo. Yule's thesiswas that Lochac = lo (Ancient Chinese *Ja) combined with kwok, that is "the kingdom of • Ld[-yukr. Yule also seemed tothinkthat the syllable Jo had an independent existence as the word which is now transcribed as Lao. In this form Yule's theory has not proved tenable. In the first place the Thai did not incorporate Lvo in their polity until 1349, so that Polo could not have heard the form Hsien Lo-hu. Secondly, only very rarely did Polo employ the termination kuo in reporting place-names outside the purely Chinese culture realm, and when, as in the case of Cipingu (< Jih-pen Kuo = Kingdom of Japan) and Caugigu (< Chiao-chih Kuo: an ancient Chinesename for Tong­King), he does use this form it is always as -gu, never as -chac. Moreover, the identification of Lochac with the state of Lvo committed Yule to a loca­tion in Thailand, which was totally inconsistent with Polo's direction of "500 miles by the sirocco" from the Kund ur Islands. In an attempt to mini­mize this inconsistency, Yule sought a precise location in what was probably the southernmost territory of Lvo in the thirteenth century, namely the neighbourhood of Ligor 31 . Even so this meant that he had to postulate a gross error - approximately south-west (garbin or aufriques) instead of south-east - either in Marco's recollection or in the transmission of the text. Nevertheless, although Yule's thesis cannot be sustained in all its ramifications, its central idea was retained by Pelliot as the basis of a more sophisticated argument.

Pelliot, influenced by his intimate acquaintance with the Iiteratures of South and East Asia, based his identification of Lochac primarily on etymolo­gical arguments 32 • Taking up the theory of Sir Henry Yule mentioned above , he elaborated in considerable detail the phonetic equivalence of Lochac and

30 YuLE, The Book. of Ser Marco Polo, vol. 2, pp. 277-279. 31 PIIILLIPS ["The seaports of India and Ceylon", p . 34] and GERINI [Researches into

Ptolemy's geography, p. 497] had already contemplated this possibility on what sub­sequently proved to be spurious phonetic grounds: Nägara [Srt Dharmaräja] > Lak.hon > Ligor > Lochac.

32 Cf. Note 20 above.

18. (fi) *-i 19. 20. *-i~4

94

• Lä-yuk, this latter being a Chinese transeription of Lavo, the ancient Thai rendering of the name of the old Mön-Khmer kingdom of Lvo (cf. Päli = Laba[pura]) with its eapital on the site of present-day Lopburl. There are two main objeetions to this interpretation, whidl Pelliot attempted to eounter in an ingenious series of arguments. In the first plaee the phonehe equi­valenee is imperfeet with regard to the final velar plosives of both Lochae and the reeonstrueted Chinesemorpheme •yuk 1221, so that Pelliot was foreed to postulate an earlier Thai form •Lavok. This expedient in fact eould be held to receive somewhat unexpeeted support from several Arabic texts which employ the epithet lawiiqt, presumably derived from a toponym closely akin to •Lavok, to denote a particular type of gaharuwood s3. One of these texts, the Kitäb al-Buldiin of Ya'qübi, dates from as early as 891.

In the seeond plaee the equation Lochac = • La-yuk holds only for pre­Sung, or at best early Sung, times. By the thirteenth century the latter word had aequired in North Chinese speech more or less its Modern Standard Chinese pronunciation of Lo-hu, so that Pelliot perforee bad to bolster his interpretation with two additional eonjeetures: (i) that the Chinese bad adopted the transeription • La-yuk during an earlier period in the evolution of their language than that in which it is first attested by extant texts; and (ii) that Polo had modelled his pronunciation of Loehac on a South Chinese voealization which had preserved the ancient sound into the thirteenth century. Neither of these suppositions is inherently unreasonable and the second is somewhat strengthened by a referenee in the Buddhist chronicle Fo-tsu li-tai t'ung-tsai 123134 of 1333-1344 to a kingdom known by, in MSC form, the name of Lo-hao 1241, whither the Sung pretender had eseaped öy way of Campii in 1278. In some South Chinese speech Lo-hao would have sounded something like *Lok-hok, and it is Pelliot's eontention that the Buddhist chronicler was drawing on "a eontemporary doeument of southern origin" for information about the same plaee as that whidl Mareo Polo knew under the name Lochae 35 • The form Lok-hok is eertainly very close to Lochac if, as indeed invariably happens, Rustichello's -eh- (or -c-) has the value of a velar plosive before an -a.

On phonehe grounds, then, Pelliot has made a reasonable ease for equating Lochac with the Mön-Khmer kingdom of Lvo, but there is a serious irnpedi-

33 E. g., Ya'qübi, Ibn al-Baytär, and Abü'l-Fazl, all conveniently accessible in Gabriel FERRAND, Relations de voyages et textes geographiques arabes, persans et turks relalifs a l'Extreme-Orient du VIIIe au XVIIIe siecles traduits, revus et annotes, vol. 1 (Ernest Leroux, Paris, 1913), pp . 52 and 285, vol. 2 (1914), p. 547.

34 Tripitaka of Meiji, Tökyö edition, Chi, XXXII, f. 41 verso . 35 It is also possible that it was the same state which appeared in Vi~t annals (in

Sinicized form) as •Luo-yak (Lu-ho) [25J. In 1149 it sought permission to trade at the mouth of the Red River [Vide PELLIOT, Notes, vol. 2, p. 768] .

22. ~t

95

ment to a too ready acceptance of this identification. Not even Pelliot's ingenuity could explain away Polo's direction of south-east from Pulau Kundur: "it is a mistake", he said, "whatever solution one may adopt for ,Lochac' ". In fact L vo lay almost precisely in the opposite direction, in the Venetian seamen's terminology por maistre or "by the plough-beam", that is to the north-west. While directions are frequently recorded inaccurately in Polo's text as it has been transmitted to us, there are few, if any, instances which involve an error of 180 °. And suCh an error was not all that likely to have slipped in as a result of careless copying, for the Polan terms for north­west and south-east, unlike the conventional European abbreviations, have nothing in common from the point of view of graphics. It would be much more probable that a conscientious editor had deliberately altered the direction in an attempt to render Polo's topographical descriptions in the form of a continuing itinerary.

There is, however, one way in which the difficulty of this apparently anomalaus direction might be resolved without recourse to textual emenda­tion. A voyage of 500 miles in a roughly south-easterly direction from Pulau Kurrdur would presuppose a landfall in western Kalimantan, and it was here that just over two centuries later Tome PIRES was to locate the "island of lane" 36. According to Pires, who was describing Kalimantau (under the rubric Burney < Brunei) from the point of view of a Malakan trader and who con­sequently approached it by way of the Kampar channel and the island of Lingga, Lane was four days' journey beyond tamJompura ( = Tanjungpura), so that CoRTESÄO was undoubtedly correct in regarding the version of the name in the extant text as a transcriber's mistake for Laue, a toponym which early Western chroniclers and cartographers located, under divers orthographies and with varying degrees of accuracy, in western Kalimantan. Antonio PIGAFETTA, for example, placed "a large city named Laoe . . . at the end of (in capo de) this island [Kalimantan] toward Java Major" 37 •

Joäo DE BARROS 38 and Fernäo Lopes DE CASTANHEDA 39 in the sixteenth century mentioned a town whose name they wrote respectively as Lave and Laue among the principal trading ports of Borneo (Kalimantan). At some time between 1597 and the end of 1600 Godinho DE EREDIA cited the Sukadana and Laue as "two abundant Rivers in the Southern country of Borneo, wherein

36 Armando CoRTESÄO (ed.}, The Suma Griental of Tome Pires. Hakluyt Society, Second Series, No. XC (London, 1944}, vol. 1, pp. 224-225 and vol. 2, p. 450. PIRES regarded Kalimantau as made up of a number of islands: cf. Burney sam mujtas Jlhas grandes & pequenas [loc. cit., vol. 2, p. 461].

37 Premier voyage autour du monde par Je Chevr. Pigafetta, sur J'escadre de Magellan, pendant les annees 1519, 20, 21 et 22. Transl. from the Italian by Charles AMORETTI (H. J. Jansen, Paris, 1801}.

3 Joäo DE BARROs, Asia. Decadas I-IV (Lisboä, 1552, 1553, 1563; Madrid, 1615). 39 Fernäo Lopes DE CASTANHEDA, Historia do descobrimento & conquista da India

pelos Portugueses (Coimbra, 1551-1561 and 1933; The Hague, 1929).

96

large quantities of Precious Stones are found" 4o, and in 1608 the Dutdl roerchant BLOEMAERT reterred to the settlement of Teyen (present-day Tajan) on the River of Lauwe 41

• In the cartographic traditions of the sixteenth century this same name occurs under a variety of forms such as Laue (often misread as Lano or Lane), Lao, Llaue, or Lave 42

• The general impression left by the roaps of the time is of a port lying close to the equator, and the frequent inclusion of some such phrase as döde foi dom manoell de Jima 43 must be

40 Emanuel Godinho DE EREDIA, Informacäo da Aurea Chersoneso, ou Peninsula e das IJhas Au_riferas, Carbunculas~. e A:o.maticas: ~ranslated from the Portugue~e , with annotahons, by J. V. MILLS, Ered1a s descnphon of Malaca, Meridional India, and Cathay", Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. 8, pt. 1 (1930), p. 245.

41 Begin ende Voortgang, vol. I (1646), 15th Voyage (Verhoeven), pp. 98-107. 42 E. g., int. al., laue or lane on an anonymaus rnanuscript chart of the East Indies,

c. 1545 (the Penrose Map); lano on the manuscript world dlarts of Pierre Desceliers, 1546, 1550 and 1553; la[u]e on Lopo Homem's world map of 1554 and on Diego Homem's manuscript dlarts of southern and eastern Asia, 1558 and 1568; llaue on Fernao Vaz Dourado's manuscript dlarts of eastern and south-east Asia of c. 1568 and 1580 respectively; Jao on Giacomo Gastaldi's printed rnap of southern Asia of 1561, on Gerard Mercator's world dlart of 1569, and on Abraham Ortelius's printed map of Asia of 1570; lave on Arnoldus Langeren's delineation of Jan van Linschoten's material printed in 1596, on a reproduction of the Kalimantau section of this map in the Caert-thresoor of 1598, and on Bartolomeu Lasso 's manuscript dlart of south­ern Asia of 1590; Laue on Willern Lodewycksz 's printed map of the East Indies of 1598. It is probably this same name which occurs as Laban on Pedro Berthelot's map of Borneo, dated to 1635, and as late as 1727 Alexander Hamilton inscribed Lava to the south of Sukadana [map reproduced in Mansei Longworth Dames, The Book of Duarte Barbosa, vol. 2 (Hakluyt Society, London, 1921), p. 207]. There is no basis for the indentification by Andrea DA MosTo [11 primo viaggio intorno al globo di Antonio Pigafetta (1894) and subsequent writers of Laue with Laut Bumbu off the south-east coast of Kalimantan. Professor Jan 0. M. BROEK ["Place names in 16th and 17th century Borneo", Imago Mundi, vol. 16 (1962), p. 135] seerns disposed to regard as an early mention of this name the form Jawai, whidl was included by Rakawi PRAPANCA in his Nägara-Kertägama (1365). It is there listedas a dependency of Majapahit, and mentioned in the same stanza as Sampit, Kota-Waringin, Sambas, and kütalinga (the neighbourhood of present-day Kudling) [Theodore G. Th. PIGEAUD, Java in the fourteenth century. A study in cultural history (Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde Translation Series, IV, vol. 1 (1960), p. 11, vol. 3 (1960), p. 16, and vol. 4 (1962), p. 31). RouFFAER and PIGEAUD [both in PIGEAUD, op. eil ., vol. 4, p. 31] also associate lawai with PIGAFETTA's Laoe, but I doubt if this is a valid equation. Phonetically lawai is more likely to have been a Javanese transcription of Labai, the name of a tributary of the Mendawak river in Western Kalimantan. My own earlier contention [Albert HERRMANN, An historical atlas of China. New edition: general editor Norton Ginsburg (Aldine Publishing Cornpany, Chicago, 1966), pp. xxv-xxvi] that the Jloucam mentioned by Francisco RoDRIGUES was another Portu­guese transcription of the same indigenous toponym must be abandoned. It is, in fact, a transcription of the name whidl we now know as Luzon. The confusion between Kalimantau and the Philippines which is betrayed by this name is also evident in the remark of Rui DE BRITO that, "Borneu is a large island, it lies between China and the Moluccas, in the open sea of the islands; the people of the island are called lucoees (= Luzons) [Cartas, 111, 92-93; quoted in CoRTESÄO, The Sumo Oriental, vol. 1, p. 132, note 1]. That RoDRIGUES hirnself was far from clear about the geography of eastern Kalimantau appears from the inscription on one of his maps (folio 36) whidllabels that island as A gramde Jlha de maquacer (The great Island of Makasar) [CoRTEsÄo, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 226, note 1].

43 This is the phrase as it appears in Vaz Dourado's atlases. On Lopo Homem's world map of 1554 it reads, onde foi dö manoel de lima; on Linschoten's printed map of eastern Asia (drawn by Langeren) of 1596 and in the Caert-thresoor of 1598 as donde foy Don Manoel: de Jima; on Bartolomeu Lasso's manuscript dlart of south­ern Asia of 1590 donde foy dö manoell de lima.

91

held to imply that it was a voyage of D. Manuel DE LIMA which brought this place to the notice of European cartographers. Cortesao notes that, although this particular voyage is apparently not confi.rmed by extant Portuguese chronicles, Castanheda does mention the presence of D. Manuel in Malaka in 1537 44 , so that there is no reason to doubt the likelihood of his having visited Laue.

Professor J an BROEK, in the course of a thorough examination of the evidence both cartographical and literary relating to the location of Laue, has de­monstrated conclusively that the river of that name was the present-day Kapuas 45 • The territory of the state presumably occupied the valley ofthat river, but the precise site of the capital is still a matter of conjecture 46. Nor is the indigenous form of the name known with certainty. There is a strong presumption that it was Malay, in which case an original Lawa or Lawak would suggest itself 47 • In fact there is a Lawak river which flows into the Mendawak just below its confluence with the Kapuas. The final -k in the transcription of such names represents a glottal check, and as such was fre­quently omitted by early European writers whose ears were untuned to the subtleties of Malay speech and who were, by virtue of their callings, unskill­ed in the niceties of phonetic transcription. There is thus a strong probability that the name of this river, an affluent of the Kapuas - which was itself known to Bloemaert as the River of Lauwe- preserves the old Malay form which earlier authors and cartographers rendered by Laue and related ortho­graphies 48 • Moreover, in view of the easy phonetic interchange between -g- [Rustichello's -eh- before -a] and -v- (-w-), Lawak provides an acceptable phonetic equivalent to the Polan Lochac. The correspondence is at least as good asthat between Lochac and Pelliofs reconstructed Thai form •Lavok,

44 CoRTESÄO, Suma Oriental, vol. 1, p. 224, note 1, quoting CASTANHEDA, Historia do descobrimento, Book IX, p. clxxviii.

45 BROEK, "Place names in 16th and 17th century Borneo", pp. 135-137. Cf. also L. C. D. VAN DIJK, Neerland's vroegste betrekkingen metBorneo ... (Amsterdam, 1862): not seen but cited from BROEK, op. eil., p. 135; P. A. TIELE, "De Europeers in den Malei­smen Ardlipel van 1509 tot 1623", Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land-en Volkenkunde van Nederlandsch-Indie, 4th series, vols. 1-8, 5th series 1-2 (1877-1888), p. 338 ; and R. A. KERN, "Lawai, Lawe", Tijdschriit Kon. Ned. Aardr. Gen., 2nd series, vol. 54 (1937), pp. 391-392.

48 G. P. RouFFAER considered that the Kapuas river formerly reached the sea by way of the channels of the present-day Mendawak and Simpang Lida, and he placed Laue at the point where the Mendawak (that is the former Kapuas) was joined by the Labai river. His argument was based primarily on a comparison of the topogra­phical descriptions of BLOEMAERT, who was in Sukadana early in the seventeenth century, with the present-day drainage pattern ("Tochten (Oudste Ontdekkings-) tot 1497", Encyclopaedie van Nederlandsch Oost-Indie, vol. 4 (First edition, 1905) , pp. 363-395]. This interpretation also offers an explanation of the reason why, on a printed map of the East lndies of 1598, Willern LoDEWIJCKSZ should have referred to Laue "on the river of Succadana" when other authors unequivocally located that city in the Kapuas valley.

47 Cp., for example, PIREs's transcription of Somali Barawa as braua (CoRTESÄO, The Suma Oriental, vol. 2, p. 333).

48 One implication of this argument is that the Jawäqi. gaharuwood mentioned above was a product of Kalimantau rather than of Thailand, as is customarily suppos­ed.

98

and, because it obviates the need to introduce supporting hypotheses based on phonetic mange, offers the desideratum of logical parsimony. However, despite this possible attraction, the linguistic argument is by no means con­clusive, and we must now turn to such supplementary information as is available in seardl of more decisive evidence.

The only extant account of Laue which has so far come to light is that penned by Tome Pires, who probably acquired his information during his residence in Malaka from 1512 to 1515. Armando Cortesäo 's transcription of the relevant passage runs as follows: Ylha de esta Jlha De lauehe quoatro dias he quoatro dias [sie] Jane damdadura alem de tamJompura hee tamanha como a de c;:ima

tem pates tem mujta Jemte todos sä Gemtios tratam com Jaoa & com malaqa he tamto do Jaoa case como de malaqa tem diamantes tem Juncos ouro em mais camtidade que tamJompura tem mercadores hee terra De mujtos mamtimentos he de boa gemte valem nela as mercadarias q sam ditäs em cima valem panos quelijs he terra De boo trato nom hobedec;:e a nemgue sam estes homees easy da maneira dos Jaos Rebustos valemtes homes de suas pas tem mujta c;:era4o

Cortesäo translates this account as follows: Island of This island of Laue is four days' journey beyond Tanjompura. Laue It is as large as the one above [i. e. Tanjompura = Tanjungpura] .

It has pates [ =Javanese palih]; it has many inhabitants; they are all heathen. They trade with Java und Malacca, and almost as much with Java as with Malacca. They have diamonds; they have junks; gold in greater quantities than Tanjompura; they have merchants. It is a country with many foodstuffs. The people are good. The merchandise mentioned above [ chiefly textiles: vide Cortesäo, Suma Oriental, vol. 1, p. 224 and vol. 2, p. 450] is of value here; Kling cloth is of value. It is a good trading country. It does not obey anyone. These people are almost like the Java­nese, robust, valiant, manly. They have a great deal of wax 50

•

Wben comparing this passage with that relating to Lochac on page 86 it must be remernbered that neither Polo nor Pires had visited the particular countries about which they were writing, and that in any case the two tra­vellers were separated in time by something over two centuries. One fact which impressed both writers was the autonomaus status of their respective kingdoms. Late in the thirteenth century Polo wrote that, because of their situation remote from the foci of political power in South-East Asia, the people of Lochac ne tont treu a nelui, and attributed supreme authority to un grant roi. Two centuries later Pires remarked that Laue nom hobedec;:e a nemgue. Elsewhere in his book, however, he partially Contradieted this statement by including Laue among the fifteenth-century conquests of Pate Unus, ruler of

411 CoRTESÄo, Suma Oriental, vol. 2, p. 450. 5° CoRTESÄo, Suma Oriental, vol. 1, pp. 224-225.

99

the North Javanese kingdom of Japara. This is, in fact, more consonant with bis subsequent vague reference to the existence of patih, a Javanese term denoting high officers of state. Probably the truth lay somewhere between these two statements. Although Laue was nominally subject to Japara, it is likely that J avanese rule did not weigh too heavily on the peoples of the Kapuas valley.

Polo and Pires agree in their statements that, despite their remote situa­tions, Lochac and Laue both contributed valuable commodities to the stream of South-East Asian trade, but their respective schedules have only a single item in common. That is gold: in such great abundance, according to Polo, that nulz Je peust croir qui ne Je veist, and em mais camtidade que tam­J ompura according to Pires. The implications of these remarks will be examined in a subsequent paragraph. The impression left by both accounts is of a fairly prosperous kingdom which took advantage of its location remote from the political highways of South-East Asia to maintain either complete, or a substantial degree of, independence.

The ultimate questiontobe faced, of course, is whether the description of Lochac is more consonant with a location in central Thailand or in western Kalimantan. The phonetic evidence has already been examined at some length, and our conclusion is that, although it is not decisive, it inclines, mainly because it requires fewer supporting assumptions, towards the equa­tion Lochac (vocalized as Logak) = Lawak > Laue, etc. rather than Lochac = •La-yuk < •Lavok. From the point of view of Marco Polo's reconstructed itinerary and its incorporated digressions a Kalimantan location is also pre­ferable since it accords more closely with the prescribed distances and directions than does the locality of Lvo in the Chao Phraya valley. In particular it removes the necessity of practically reversing one of Polo's directions. The only item among the locational data which might be held to favour a site in central Thailand is the clause in the Zelada Codex 51 and derivative recensions (but not in the Franco-Italian version) which places Lochac "on the firm land" (que est de tera [sie] firma). The Zelada recension derives from a tradition older than the Franco-Italian text and any addition or emendation it contributes to the narrative deserves careful scrutiny. The implication of a site on the mainland of Asia is not to be lightly dismissed, but must be weighed against the cumulative weight of evidence for a location in Kalimantan. The most that can be urged against it are the possibilities either that Polo, or at least the author of the Zelada Codex, was using the phrase terra firma in the generalsense of a large landmass, orthat a copyist inserted the expression in an attempt to make sense of a text whose structure he did not fully comprehend.

The meagre roster of cultural characteristics recorded by Polo affords an inadequate basis on which to decide between these two locations. Not even the imputed religious affiliations seem to have muc::h significance for our present enquiry, for the inhabitants of Lochac were assigned to the inclusive category of European religious thought known as "idolaters" (ydres in F,

51 MouLE and PELLIOT, Marco Polo, vol. 2, p. lxiv.

100

cuius gentes adorant ydola in Z). However, Marco's descriptions of some of the ethnic groups of Central Asia make it abundantly evident that this term was broad enough to subsume Buddhists. Indeed, Polo seems to have attributed all forms of Asian idolatry to a common faunder whom he identi­fied with Sagamoni Bure an ( = Sakyamuni Burqan 52). By the end of the thir­teenth century, when Polo presumably acquired his information about Lvo the state religion there was, in fact, Theraväda Buddhism, diluted with animism no doubt among the mass of the people. The situation in Laue at this time was obscure, and two centuries later Pires, a devout adherent of the Church of Rome, predictably classed its population simply as heathen (Gemtios). On general grounds it may be premised that at the time of Polo's horneward voyage Laue shared in the amalgam of religious tenets current in the kingdom of Singhasäri, namely Bhairava Buddhism in court circles and the ever-present blend of Hindu, Buddhist, and animistic beliefs among the populace at large. In any case the superficiality of Marco's understand­ing of Buddhist doctrine would have prevented him from disentangling the eclectic, and often syncretistic, characteristics assumed by this religion in

52 Sagamoni Burcan is the form, restored by PELLlOT (Notes, vol. 2, p. 823), whidl PoLo must have dictated. Although it does not occur in any extant recension of the Devisement dou Monde, it is very close to the transcription Shäkamüni-Burkhän used by Rashidu'd-Din in the so-far unpublished part of his work whidl relates to the history of China. F reads sergamoni borcain, sergomon saint, and sergomoni borcan; Z sogomoni burchan and sogomoni burghan; VB santo brachan, sogomor barchan, and sogomor barcon; LT sergamon borchaym; L sergarmoni borcain; TAt serghamon borghani; and R sogamombar can and sogomonbarchan. Sagamoni is a transcription of Sigämuni, the colloquial Mongolian rendering of Sakyamuni = Sage of the Sakyas = Gautama Buddha. The etymology of Burqan presents difficulties. The commonly adduced derivation from North Chinese • b'juat 1261 (MSC fo: = Buddha) combined with Altaic khan ( = sovereign) is not entirely satisfactory [This view was first propounded by Sir E. Dennison Ross in Ricci , The travels of Marco Polo , p. 432: cp. also Louis HAMBIS, "Notes preliminaires a une biographie de Bayan le Märkit", Journal Asiatique, vol. 241 (1953), p. 224). Marco hirnself translated the term to mean "saint": cf. sergamoni borcain, que vaut a dir sergamoni saint [BE EDETTO, IJ Milione, p. 194]. Berthold LAUFER ["Burkhan", Journal of the American Griental Society, vol. 36 (1917), pp. 390 et seq.J and P. K. KozLow [Mongolei, Amdo und die tote Stadt Chara-choto. Transl. from the Russian (Berlin, 1925) , p. 50] assert that the Mongois also used the term in the sense of "idol". In any case burqan occurred at an early date in both Uighur and Mongolian, and by Polo's time had come to cons­titute part of the name of what Leonardo 0LSCHKI has called "a transcendent miracle­worker who was obeyed by gods and devils alike, natural and occult forces, and the spirits of the departed" [Marco Polo's Asia (University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1960) , p. 256] . Marco's remark on Sagamoni Burqan as the founder of all idolatries is as follows: e de cestui sunt desendue tutes les ydres (BENEDETTO, 11 Milione, p. 194) . RAMusm's recension also incorporates an alleged statement of Qubilai's beliefs by the Emperor hirnself in which he refers to "sogomonbardlan who was the first god of the idols" [MoULE and PELLIOT, Marco Polo, vol. 1, p. 201]. It is noteworthy in this connexion that just over half a century earlier, in 1225, CHAo Ju-kua had referred to a Buddha called •Ma-ya-mjuat [27J (= Mu:Q.ammad) [Chu-fan­chih 1281, pt. 1, (Feng Ch'eng-chün's 1291 edition, Shanghai, 1938), p . 48.

26. -$

101

the several realms of Asia. The most that can be said is that Marco's briet reference to the religion of Lochac is inimicable neither to a location in the lower Chao Phraya valley nor to one in western Kalimantan.

Nor, despite emphasis on autonomy, is Marco's information relating to the political status of Lochac at all conclusive. Although Lvo and Laue may have enjoyed effective independence at the close of the thirteenth century, there can be no doubt that in both instances it was a fortuitous and tempo­rary status. In the case of Lvo it was the result of the disruption of the traditional pattern of political authority in the Chao Phraya valley con­sequent on the consolidation ofThaipower and the establishment of a new state at Sukhothai; in the case of Laue such limited autonomy - if, indeed, it existed at all - was probably incidental to the weakening of central authority towards the end of the reign of Kertanagara of Singhasäri (1268-1292). More to the point, perhaps, is the unlikelihood that Polo would have comprehended the concept of multiple political allegiance as it was com­monly practised in South and East Asia, and which may well have led him, acquiring his information as he did at second-hand, to confuse political opportunism with absolute independence. Polo's insistence on the remote­ness of Lochac may be held to favour a situation in Kalimantao rather than in the lower Chao Phraya valley, but his comments on the immunity ofthat state - or of any other in South-East Asia for that matter - ring rather hollowly when we recall Qubilai's dispatch of a punitive expedition to Java in 1293. In any case *La-yuk (Lvo) did contrive tosend tribute missions to the Chinese court in 1289, 1291, 1296, 1297 and 1299 53, a record which accords poorly with Polo's tale of the ruler of Lochac's reluctance to engage in for­eign relations. There is no record of Laue ever having sent envoys to the Dragon Throne.

It was tobe hoped that in Marco's list of Lochac products there would have been one which would have proved diagnostic of a particular location. Although in the event this hope was not realized the implications of the several items still merit consideration. The emphasis on gold in both Lochac and Laue has been remarked on above. Placer deposits of this metal occur in considerable quantities in the coastal zone north of the Kapuas river, that is within the area where Pires and sixteenth century European cartographers located Laue 54• In Thailand, by contrast, although placer gold has been reported in twenty-eight of the seventy changwats, generally speaking resources arerather limited. Moreover, as far as I have been able to ascertain,

53 Yüan Shih, dlüan 15, f. 10 recto; chüan 16, f. 9 verso; chüan 19, f. 4 recto and 5 verso ; chüan 20, f. 1 recto.

54 The extent of tbese deposits was amply attested in the nineteenth century when some thirty thousand Chinese, who were exploiting not only the placer gold but also the reefs in the hinterland of Pontianak, took over control of the countryside and constituted themselves an imperium in imperio.

102

there is no extant tradition associating Lopburi (Lvo) with gold production ss.

The nearest significant deposit is the Krabin lode in Changwat Prachinburi sG,

but there is no evidence of this having been worked in early times. The only possible conclusion is that the Polan emphasis on the abundance of gold in Lochac, while not conclusive, favours a location in western Kalimantan.

The mention of porcelaine 57 in connexion with Lochac deserves special comment. The basic meaning of the term, and the one intended in the present context, is "cowry'' 58 and, not surprisingly, Pelliot did not fail to recall the Iong history of cowry currency in Thailand. Some fifty years after Polo dictated his account of Lochac W ANG Ta-yüan (1350) remarked that the people of *La-yuk "conducted their trade with cowries (pa-tzi1) (so) instead of coins" 59. A century later MA Huan, perhaps influenced by Wang's remark, wrote in his .Ying-yai sheng-lan l321 that the inhabitants of Hsien-lo "used cowries in theirtrade transactions just as [weuse] coppercash" 6o, and FEIHsin in 1436 copied Wang's sentence with only minor variations into his Hsing-

55 The corpus of legend which associates the city of Uthong ( = Source of Gold) with the Suwanp'umi ( = Suval).I).abhümi [Päli] = Land of Gold} of earlier times is of no significance. Suval).I).abhümi (or Suvarl).advipa [Skt.]) was a legendary name claimed by many South-East Asian cities and polities and, in any case, myths per­taining to the precious metal are so interwoven into the folklore of the region that early writings whidl mention it can hardly ever be accepted at their face value. Of course, it is not impossible that PoLo's informants were repeating myths which they bad heard from the local inhabitants rather than reporting an attested mineral occurrence.

56 Gien F. BROWN, Saman BURAVAS, Jumdlet CHARALJAVA APHET, Nitipat J ALICHA DRA, William D. JoHNSTON, Jr., Vija SRESTHAPUTRA, and George TAYLOR, Jr. , Geologie recon­naissance of the mineral deposits of Thailand. Geological Survey Bulletin 984 (United States Government Printing Office, Washington, 1951), pp. 69-70.

57 porcellane in Z, L, and LT; porcelane in Z and LT; porcellana in R; pourcelaines in FA 1 [MS. fr. 5631 in the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, a fourteenth-century text], FA 2 [MS. fr. 2810 in the same library: c. 1400]. FA 3 [MS. 3511 in the B'bliotheque de I' Arsenal: c. 1500], FA 4 [M. 723 in the J. Pierpont Morgan Library, New York : c. 1400], and FB; porzelane and porzellana in various Venetian recensions (V, VA, VB}; porciellane in two Tuscan recensions (TA 1 and TA 3}; and porzellane de marin VA 1

[an early fourteenth-century Venetian text, now MS. 3999 in the Bibi. Casanatense in Romel.

58 Vide PELLioT's two magnifi.cent expositians in Notes on Marco Polo, vol. 1, pp. 531-563 and vol. 2, pp. 805-812. Derivative meanings of porcelaine included "dlinaware" and "mother-of-pearl vases", and, presumably by etymological con-vergence, "purslane". . .

59 W ANG Ta-yüan, Tao-i chih-lüeh, edited and annotated by FUJITA Toyohadu m Hsiieh-t'ang Ts'ung-k'e [31], f. 32 verso.

60 W. W. RocKHILL, "Notes on the relations and trade of China with the Eastern An:hipelago and the coasts of the Indian Ocean during the fourteenth century", T' oung Pao, vol. 16 (1915), p. 102.

3o. mE-r-

103

ch'a sheng-Jan [331 61 • This in turn was copied into the Shu-yü chou-tzi1 Ju by YEN Ts'ung-dlien 136162 and more or less similar remarks on the cowry cur­rency of Thailand found their way into CHENG Hsiao's Huang-Ming ssi1-i k'ao (37]63 of 1564, MAo Jui-cheng's Huang-Ming hsiang-hsü lu 138164 of 1629, W ANe Ch'i 's Hsü Wen-hsien t'ung-k'ao 139165 , and Lu Ying-yang's Kuang-yü chi 1401 66 of 1600.

Pelliot incorporated this Thai tradition of cowry money into bis theory of the location of Lochac 61 , but I think that he may have been a little hasty in adducing such evidence in support of bis argument. It is perhaps worth while to examine the precise wording of Polo's text. The F recension reads s1mply, Et de ceste reigne vont tou!ltes Jes porcelaine [sie] que s'espeuent en toutes provences, com jeo vos ai contes (And from this kingdom go all the cowries which are spent in all the provinces, as I have told you). These previously mentioned "provinces" are Toloman (< T'u-lao Man 1411 or T'u-Ja Man 1421 = the T'u-lao or T'u-la barbarians of north-eastern Yün-nan) 68,

Caugigu (< Chiao-chih Kuo = the Vi~tnamese State centred on the Tong­King lowland) 69 , Amu (= An-nam > • Annd > • Aman > • Amau > • Amu) 70,

and Bangala ( = Bengal) 71 , and patently reflect the extent of territory intend­ed in Polo's original dictation. However, in some of the Court French recen­sions a copyist has changed the sense to make Lochac a supplier of cowries to "all the other [Z: an addition which does not significantly change the sense of the passage] provinces of the world [FB] ", which is clearly nonsense. Pelliot interpreted Marco's presumed original phrasing as a statement to the effect that the cowries used in Yün-nan and neighbouring territories came

81 RocKHILL, op. cit., p. 105. There is a probable clerical error in FEI Hsin's text when he equates 10,000 cowries with 20 taels (liang) (34] in Chung-t'ung (35) paper money, whereas WA G Ta-yüan bad written 24 taels . There is a discussion of the real value of this coinage in PELLIOT, Notes, vol. 1, p. 552 et seq., where later European references to the Thai cowry currency are also examined.

82 Chüan 8, f. 12 recto. ea Kuo-hsüeh wen-k'u edition, chüan 1, f. 63. 64 Edition of the National Library of Pei-p'ing, chüan 4, f. 16 verso. 65 Chüan 236, f. 2 verso. 66 Chüan 24, f. 11 recto. 67 PELLIOT, Notes, vol. 1, p. 552. 68 BE EDETTO, IJ Milione, p. 127. 69 op. eil., p. 125. 70 op. eil., p. 126. 71 op. eil., p. 125.

33. lt1ä, ?lJ~J]J~ 34. ~ 35.

37. iBBt, ~Bjj[I9~~ (~+JtJ!)

39. .=f±JT, fiJtfl*jj~

41. JE/±~W: 42. JE1FIJm 104

~*1C 36. '*itt. ~Jf ' 38. ~Irffifji,

40 . ~J:!a~,

9Jkt.~mF§i17<

~ BA~Wj~

/1l( J!.g~

mainly from Lochac, whkh he located in the lower Chao Phraya valley 12.

Even if Lochac had been situated in present-day Thailand there could be no question of the shells having been produced there in quantities sufficient to sustain a currency. Such a currency can only be operated in areas which are fairly distant from sources of supply, in other words where new coin does not lie ready for the piddng on local beaches. Several different species of Cypraea have on occasion been pressed into service as counters of exchange but only two, C. moneta, Linn. and, to a lesser extent, C. annulus, Linn. , have ever constituted fully operative currencies. These species occur in adequate quantities in only three regions: on the Maldive coasts, on the shores of equatorial East Africa, and in the eastern sectors of the Malay world. In fact , Thailand has traditionally imported her cowries from the Maldives (Cypraea moneta), and occasionally from the Moluccas and the Philippines (Cypraea annulus)13• Pelliot was aware of this fact, and argued that Lochac was merely the transshipment point for cowries from the Indian Ocean and the islands of South-East Asia which were then traded northwards to Yün-nan. But, as we have seen, cowries have been collected in quantity round the Philippine and Indonesian coasts. Both Schneider and Jackson, authors of detailed mono­graphs on the occurrence and use of cowries, associate them specifically with Kalimantan 74• Moreover, the latter writer observed, without citing bis source, that they were taken as bailast by vessels sailing from Kalimantan to Ayutthaya 75 • Finally, it must surely be significant that the Thai word for Cypraea (bld: cp. Lao bia h6i) is closely related to the Malay name (roman­ized by English students as bea, but written biya in the modified Arabic script). It is a priori unlikely that the Malays, inhabiting a region which was

7! PELLIOT, Notes, vol. 1, p. 552. For a variety of reasons PELLJOT discounted the other countries mentioned above. There is, for example, no independent confirmatory evidence that a cowry currency ever existed in Caugigu or Amu, both of which names related to the Vi~t territories of the time, so it is to be presumed that PoLo was in fact referring to the cowry money which circulated in Yün-nan (including the T'u-lao Man territories) and along its southern borders. Bengal was grouped with these regions only because Marco had acquired his information about that country when he was in Yün-nan and at the sametime as he had heard about the other cowry coinages.

7S Sirnon DE LA LOUBERE, Description du Royaume de Siam, vol. 2 (first published in 1691: Amsterdam reprint, 1714), pp. 222-223; Domingo NAVARRETE [Tratados historicos, politicos, ethicos y religiosos de Ja monarchid de China (Madrid, 1676), p. 61]; and Nicolas GERVAISE, Histoire natureiJe et politique du Siam (Paris, 1688), p. 152. At an earlier date, 1609, Antonio DE MoRGA had noticed that siguei ( = Tagal sigay = cowry) were exported from the Philippines to both Siam and Cambodia [Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas. Translation by H. E. J. STANLEY, (Hakluyt Society, London, 1868), p. 285]. Mgr. PALLEGOIX did remark that, "Les petits coquillages appeh~s porcelaine ... se trouvent en abondance sur les bancs de sable" bordering the Gulf of Siam, but made no reference to their transshipment northwards . In any case his statement must, in the light of Siamese imports of cowries from the Maldives and the Malay world, be understood in a comparative context [Vide Description du Royaume Thai ou Siam, vol. 1 (Vialet et Cie., Lagny, 1854) . p. 196].

74 Oskar ScHNEIDER, Muschelgeld-Studien. Nach dem hinterlassenen Manuskript bearbeitet von Carl RmBE (Ernst Engelmann's Nachfg., Dresden, 1905) , pp. 102, 107, 110, and 118; J. Wilfrid JACKSON, Shells as evidence of the migrations of early culture (at the University Press, Manchester, 1917), p. 171.

75 ibid.

105

a major source of cowries, would have borrowed the name used by the Thai in territories where the shells occurred in much reduced quantities. Pre­sumably the loan was from Malay to Thai, following the direction of the cowry trade. In short, Polo's remarks on the importance of cowries in Lochac, while not diagnostic of a specific location, do not exclude a site in Kalimantan. Pelliot's argument, which relates all the cowry references to Yün-nan and neighbouring territories and which plausibly views a state in the lower Chao Phraya valley as the intermediary between producing and consuming regions, is, like so many of Pelliot's theses, rendered intellec­tually attractive by reason of its parsimony and coherence, but this inherent reasonableness is achieved by construing Polo's phrases as referring ex­clusively to what we may call the northern Indochinese cowry complex. But the phrases themselves are neutral and may be adduced in support of the production of cowries in Laue (Lawak) equally as readily as of their trans­shipment through Lvo.

The other natural products of Lochac afford even less reason for dog­matism. The beci domesce (no doubt correctly as berci in F, L, and Z) 76 is the verzino dimestico or "cultivated brazil-wood" which PEGALOTTI distin­guished from verzino salvatico (lit. = wild brazil-wood) 77. Brazil-wood (modern trade-name = sappan[wood] < Malay sepang: cp. Khmer sba.il and Thai fang) is a small, priddy dye-bearing tree, which ranges from India throughout South-East Asia, and it is this commodity to which Pelliot, Moule, and virtually all previous investigators have considered Polo to have been referring. In Malabar in recent times brazil-wood has been both cultivated and exploited in its wild state 78, and Marco hirnself is usually considered to have described a process of cultivation in LämurF9 in north-west Sumatra (see below). However, these authors have all been puzzled by the addendum in a Venetian version (VA) of the F recension that the fruits of the berci "are like lemons and are very good". RAMUSIO's Italian translation is more ex­plicit, adding that these fruits are good to eat. By common consent Marco was in grievous error in making this reference to the alleged edibility of the fruits of brazil-wood. Nevertheless, I doubt if we are here dealing \Nith an

76 Also berci in TA 1, Z, and R; berer [de mastica] in LT; berzi in VA; birci and lurci in P; oro dimesticho in TA 1; verci in L; verzi in L, V , and VB; verzin and verzino inR.

i? Allan EvANS, La pratica della mercatura. Medieval Academy of America (Har­vard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1936), pp. 295 and 296.

78 YuLE, The Book oi Ser Marco Polo, vol. 2, p. 380; but in connexion with the following argument note that the trees required some fourteen or fifteen years to readl maturity.

79 PoLo's dictation was probably Lambri, whidl occurs in L, LT, P, TA 1, VL, Z, R, and some other recensions. VB reads abraan and Janbren, F and VA Jabri, VA and Z lanbri. For recent succinct summafies of references to this kingdem see PELLIOT, Notes, vol. 2, pp. 761-762, and WoLTERS, Early Indonesian commerce, pp. 178--179.

106

instance of textual corruption 80, and certainly not with a misunderstanding

by Polo himself. At the conclusion of the passage on Lämuii already mention­ed he remarked,

Et si vos di tout voiremant que nos en aportames de celle seme[n]se a Venese et Je seminames sor Ja terre; si vos di qu'il n'i nasqui noiant. E ce avint por [Je] Jeu froit s1•

Moreover I teil you quite truly that we brought away some of that [said: FB] seed [of the brazil: FB) to Venese and sowed it on the ground. Yet I tell you that it did not grow there at all; and [I believe: VB] this came about through the cold position, [because they had not hol ground, even very hol: VA] [and the seeds died: VB]82•

It is evident that, although the attempt to grow the seeds in Venice was unsuccessful, Marco was not unfamiliar with the plant and was certainly likely to have known if its fruits were edible or not. And, despite the use of the dye culinarily as a colouring agent and medicinally as an emmenagogue, there is no question of any part of CaesaJpinia sappan being eaten. The clue to the resolution of this apparent paradox lies, I think, in Polo's account of the cultivation of this so-called brazil-wood in Lämur'i.

Et de[J] ben;i vos di que ille seminent; e, quant ii est nes en petite verge, i1 Je cavent; e Je plantent en autre Jeu. Et iluec Je Jaisent por tro is anz et puis Jes cavent con taute !lies raisss.

And of brazil I tell you that they sow it and when it is grown into a little twig they dig it up and plant it [again: VA] in another place; and there they leave it [to grow: FB] for [the space of: VB] three years, and then they dig it up with all the roots fand plant it again several times: VB].[And so they sell it: L]B4.

The transplanting of a crop in this manner is a typicallegacy of the agri­cultural tedmiques of the Old Planter culture of Sauth-East Asia but it is quite unsuitable for the propagation and exploitation of CaesaJpinia sappan. In fact, what is here described is almost certainly the garden cultivation of Morinda citrifolia, Linn., var. bracteata, known in the Malay-speaking parts of Sumatra as mekudu (cp. Peninsular Malay mengkudu). lt is a small tree grown in villages throughout both mainland and archipelagic Sauth-East Asia and bearing fruits of ellipsoidal shape and greyish white colour, whidl

80 Except in the case of three fifteenth-century Latin texts [MS. barberiniano Iat . 2687 in the Bibl. Vaticana (LA 1); MS. Jat. 18770 of the Staatsbibl., Munich (LA 2

);

MS. 121 in the Bibi. Civ. of Luxemburg (LA 3)], in which the so-called brazil is con­fused with cowries: (LA1) ibi nascantur quedam animalia que domesticantur et sunt similes hominibus .. . nascantur etiam ibi portulace tante grossitudinis in stipite, quod in ligni duritiem conversi stipites earum fiunt ex eis pulcerime scutelle utiles ad pulmentum ministrandum (LA 2, 3: ad comedendum). Ex his etiam portulacis siccatur (LA 2,

3:

secatur) et scinditur ad Jormam denarii moneta pluribus provinciis usualis [from MouLE & PELLIOT, Marco Polo, vol. 1, p. 369, note 4).

81 BENEDETTO, ll MiJione, p. 174. 82 MouLE and PELLIOT, Marco Polo, vol. 1, p. 376. 83 BENEDETTO, II Milione, p. 174. 84 MouLE and PELLIOT, Marco Polo, vol. 1, p. 376.

107

presumably conjured up for Marco a memory of lemons. Although they have a rancid smell, especially when ripe, it is reported from Indochina that they are eaten with a flavouring of salt 85 . In the Malay world the fruit, often in an over-ripe state, is, as far as I have been able to ascertain, used only for medicinal purposes, notably as an emmenagogue 86

• The point is that the fruit is eaten for one purpose or another. Moreover, the root hark yields a dye whlch gives permanent shades of red, purple, and chocolate and which was formerly much used in the Javanese batik industry. The indigenous names for Morinda are everywhere distinct from those for Caesalpinia, so we must assume that it was Marco bimself who regarded the plant - with which, as we have seen, he was familiar at first-hand - as a species of brazil-wood. lt is interesting, though, that Pegalotti also subscribed to this botanical error, which was apparently common among early European tra­vellers in South-East Asia. Where and how it originated is unknown. In any case, like the true brazil-wood, Morinda is so widely diffused throughout South-East Asia that it is of no diagnostic value so far as the location of Lochac is concerned.

In one of the Venetian recensions (VB) musk and ebony (muschio et ha[ba]no) are added to the list of natural products of Lochac. In view of the restriction of this reference to a single manuscript tradition Benedetto is probably correct in regarding muschio as a mislection of domesce carelessly copied as do mesce 87 • If so, then it was an error which had become an integral part of the recension by the middle of the fifteenth century, for VB was written in 1446. Even if the reference were authentic it could not have been concerned with true musk, the secretion of an accessory sexual gland of the male of Moschus moschiferus, Linn., a deer of Central Asian habitat. Central Thailand lies weil beyond the southernmost range of this animal, though there is evidence that musk was traded southwards from Yün-nan at least as early as the ninth century A. D. 88 If the Polan text be interpreted at its face

85 I. H. BuRKILL, A dictionary of the economic products of the Malay Peninsula, vol. 2 (Crown Agents for the Colanies on behalf of the Governments of the Straits Settlements & the Federated Malay States, London, 1935), p. 1493.

86 ibid. 87 BENEDETTO, Il Libro di Messer Marco Polo, p. 433 . 88 In the Man Shu (dlüan 6, p. 162 of Hsiang Ta's edition, Pei-dling, 1962), compiled

between A. D. 860 and 865, FAN Ch'o 1431 mentioned a mart called •n'ai-ngien K'ung 1441 (Ta-yin K'ung) at whidl southern traders from regions such as Java (•Dz'ia-b'ua: She-p'o) and Kalimantan ("B'uat-niei: P'o-ni) 1461 obtained gold and musk. The location of • D'ai-ngien K'ung would have remained very uncertain had not the Sung encyclopaedia T'ai-p'ing Yü-lan [dlüan 981, f. 5 verso] preserved a passage from an earlier work, the Nan-i Chih 1471, which ascribed the same market, though without assigning it a name, to • N9-m-tsiäu [48] (Nan-Chao). Note: the Man

43. ~*Ji!, •• 47. -m~~

108

44. *illiL 48. -mm

value the substance in questionwas most likely to have been civet-musk, obtained from one of the civet-cats. In Lvo this could have been Viverra zibetha, Linn., and in Laue V. tangalunga, Grey. Just over half a century earlier CHAO Ju-kua, Superintendent of Maritime Trade (Shih-po Shih (50J)

in Fu -chien, had reported that P' o-ni 1511 ( = Brunei) was "the only foreign country in which wu-na ch'i 1521 (= civet) was very abundant". In view of the dubious reliability of the VB recension in this matter we shall not elaborate on the implications of this remark 89 •

It is difficult to explain away as a copyist's error the reference to ebony which is bracketed with musk in VB, but its occurrence in a single manuscript tradition is not such as to inspire confidence. In 1225 Chao Ju-kua had listed wu-men tzu 1531 ( = ebony) among the products of Tan-ma-ling (54J ( = Tämbra­li.riga), a territory on the isthmian tract of the Malay Peninsula Do, where it would have been obtained fromDiospyros clavigera, C. B. Clarke or D.lucida, Wall . It is probable that during the eleventh and twelfth centuries the terri­tory of Lvo had extended southwards to include part of the Malayan isthmus, so that an apologist for a peninsular location for Lochac might be tempted to argue that Polo had picked up a fragment of popular information from the past and applied it uncritically to his own century. However, ebony from one or other species of Diospyros is found throughout Sauth-East Asia and any argument applicable to Thailand is equally applicable to Kalimantan. The character and reliability of the sole text to mention this wood does not justify an extended discussion of this point.

The mention of elephants (leofant : F; elephantes : Z) in Lochac deserves comment for the natural range of this very distinctive animal did not extend to Kalimantao or Java. But I do not think great importance should be attached to this fact for there are numerous records of elephants being imported into both those countries for use in the rulers' courts.

Shu was apparently lost during the Ming dynasty, but the substances of its contents was preserved under discrete rubrics in the Yung-lo Ta-lien, a massive encyclopaedia compiled under the direction of HsiEH Chinin 1407. In 1773 an anonymaus scholar a ttempted to reconstitute the original work by recombining the relevant passages from the Yung-lo Ta-tien which, in accordance with the information preserved in the Literary Catalogue of the New T'ang History, he arranged in ten chapters. The reconstituted work was printed by the Wu-ying Tien 1491 in 1774.

89 lt is just possible, though much less probable, that the musk-like substance referred to was gaharu laut (Malay) or "sea gaharu" the product of Excoecaria agallocha, Linn., that is muskwood, or as RuMPF called it, bastard aloes-wood, a small tree found on the coasts of the Indian Ocean from tropical Africa to Australia. Although formerly used locally wherever it occurred, it is doubtful if the diseased aromatic wood of this tree (as opposed to the sound wood which was used for general carpentry purposes) occurred in sufficient quantities to sustain a regular trade.

90 Vide 0. W. WoLTERS, "Tämbraliilga", Bulletin of the School of Griental and African Studies, vol. 21, pt. 3 (1958), pp. 587-607.

49. it~~

53. ,~filf;i7-

5o. m001i 54. ~~~~

109

In seeking a location for Lochac I think. that, in the light of our present knowledge of South-East Asian history, it is necessary to evaluate only two of the numerous hypotheses so far advanced, namely Pelliot's identification with Lvo in present-day central Thailand and the alternative site in western Kalimantao suggested in the preceding pages. Phonetically there is not mudl to d:wose between these theories, though the latter requires fewer support­ing assumptions. From the point of view of locational data a Kalimantau location accords more closely with Polo's sailing direction of por sceloc, but it requires that the description of Lochac be regarded as a digression. A site in southern Thailand, by contrast, would allow Lochac tobe fitted into a coherent itinerary, but only at the cost of a gross distortion of the text. As a matter of fact Pelliot did not adopt this expedient but also supposed the Lochac excursus to be a digression 91 , so that he and I are in agreement in regarding Marco - or perhaps more likely Rustid:l.ello - as having taken up the narrative from the Kundur Islands. This necessitates the assumption that a weil intentioned but ill informed copyist has at some time substituted Lochac for Sandur et Gondur at this point in the text in the same way as he has substituted Java for Campä after the previous digression. The stipulated course of D milles por midi to 1' isle de Pentan 92 ( = Bintan) is then not too gross a distortion of the required direction, although the true distance is somewhat underestimated. The possibility of amending por sceloc to read por garbin in order to sustain the argument for a location on the Malayan isthmus would be gratuitous unless it could be supported by virtually incon­trovertible phonetic or cultural evidence, and such an expedient is explicitly rejected in both interpretations. Sofaras Polo's Iist of natural products is at issue, none is diagnostic of a specific site, but the references to gold and cow­ries in my opinion tend to favour Kalimantao rather than Thailand. The mention of musk is of dubious authenticity but, for what it is worth, would also seem to point to Kalimantan. Ebony, ben;i, and elephants are of indeter­minate significance in the present context. On this accounting the balance of probability would seem to incline in favour of a location for Lochac in western Kalimantan. However, when the available evidence is so meagre and ambivalent an arithmetical totting up of probabilities cannot Iead to definitive certainty, and this paper does not attempt to prove a Kalimantao site. Rather it is designed to introduce a new element into, and consequently to re-open, a problern whid:l. has come to be considered as solved, and the reader is left to balance the probabilities and imponderables in his own mind.

91 Cf. P ELLioT's explicit statement to this effect in Notes, vol. 2, p. 769. 92 This is the reading of VB, Z, and R: pantayn and plantayn occur in FB; pantein

and pontain in FA; penta and pitam in TA 1; pentai in VB; pentaim in VA; pentain in Fand L; pentam, petain, and petam in TA1; pentay, pentayn, and pantauich in LT, pentera and pepetan in VL; pentham in P.

110